THE (BEAR) HUNT FOR THE SELF: A REVIEW

The reviewer at work, madly laughing
or laughing madly?

As it turns out, Ellison is a voracious reader, and he already enjoys writing about literature. You should check out his review of We're Going on a Bear Hunt in last month's The New York Review of Books. I'll only excerpt from it here because it's really long, but be warned: It's pretty intense. I think that the boy's late-night viewing of Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man may have influenced his reading....

THE (BEAR) HUNT FOR THE SELF

Ellison begins, "We--all of us--are beings unto death. But what of it? To be fully human, we must at some point confront the abyss of our own Nothingness and its oblivion that comes when last we exhale. Perhaps it is this confrontation that is, at root, the beginnings of ontology. And as such, so it is and ever has been that we needs must confront our own deaths and the absurdity of everything before it in order to live--as Thoreau tells us in that famous line--deliberately. But how to get to that point? A question that has haunted us from the first moments of our first ponderings. Finally, in Michael Rosen's profound Existential parable We're Going on a Bear Hunt, we just might have a sustainable and sustaining answer. 

[....] 

As if animating the Buddha's Truth of Dukkha, the unnamed narrator repeatedly reminds us that we can't, in fact, go over it. No. Nor can we go under it. Again, no. In an attempt to force the reader to confront the basic "unsatisfactoriness" that pervades all forms of existence, we are reminded--again and again, as if Gertrude Stein herself were behind these crazed incantations--that, put simply, "we've got to go through it" (my emphasis). True, whatever "it" is that needs "going through" changes--"it" is at various points a muddy ravine, a river, a forest, a cave, and so on. And as the natural world challenges us, relentlessly, ceaselessly, like waves crashing ashore until the end of time, we recognize that Nature just is. No agenda hides behind the face of nature. When at last the family "stumbles and trips" upon the great bear for which they have been "hunting," the text has already prepared the reader for the sublime confrontation. And so it is with equal parts joy and terror that we recall Crane's masterwork, "The Open Boat," and the terrible truth we learned there: “She [nature] did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise.  But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent." 

[....] 

As the bear crashes through the underbrush, chasing the family out of and away from the dark frontier and back into its comfortable, bourgeois existence announced by the return to the domestic, we find ourselves wishing for intentionality in the natural world, for in so finding it, we might, however briefly, feel comforted. But the bear--very much like the scorpion who catches a ride on the frog--is simply doing what it must, blindly and without intention. It forces the family's return to its "proper" sphere of being, but lingers, as it has been always already, on the porch, it's deep snarl echoing in our souls and reminding us that death is ever at our door. 

Pretty dark stuff? Well, yes. But put in another context, we might instead describe Rosen's parable as honest. As joyous, even. ​For if Heidegger (et al.) is right that death, that final horizon, gives our lives meaning and frees us from the putrid obligations of Sartre's "serious world," then that bear at our own door is in fact our liberation, a "goggly-eyed" reminder of our radical freedom.

[....]

But the tale has not yet concluded, and as we follow the family back into the safety of bed, we watch them wrench the covers over their heads in an attempt to deny the bear's existence, to keep it at bay, to put off death: "We're not going on a bear hunt again!" the family intones. But too soon, we recognize--following Emily Dickinson--that if we do not stop for Death, it will "kindly" stop for us. Dickinson's poem rises like a ghostly palimpsest below and beneath Rosen's prose, always reminding us that we are ever directed "toward eternity."

[....]

Perhaps the narrative instability suggested by the little girl's holding of a teddy bear as she and her family cuddle in bed at story's end is simply an intentional erasure of our own expectations, of our profound longing for meaning and meaningful closure, for a story that ties itself up neatly at the end. Rosen's characteristically postmodern gesture of denying narrative closure and, instead, inviting uncertainty back into the text recalls (perhaps paradoxically in that this remains a parable, which is by definition anti-realistic) the "dirty" realism of Raymond Carver. 

[....]

In short, perhaps that little girl is this dark, broken world's very own Keyser Söze, collecting fragments of story from the detritus of lives around her--riffing like a maniacal Thelonius Monk at Minton's Playhouse--before spontaneously, extemporaneously breathing life into the narrative we hold in our hands.

As this potentiality dawns on us, we feel as if we are stomach-crawling out of Plato's cave, abandoning those walled shadows for the harsh light of reality that waters our eyes and wrenches our hearts. We long again for the benighted existence of the cave dweller. Instead of placating us with an annunciation of our own expectations, this little girl and her teddy bear shake us out of our long-established assumptions and desires in order to reveal the inherent artificiality of storytelling. 

[....]

And rightly, on the final page, there is no text. Language has failed--failed utterly--to 
convey truth, which must remain ineffable, untouchable, unexpressed. The bear--perhaps only a figment of a child's (or our own) imagination--walks along the shore away from us, chasing the moon for all eternity. Regardless of our own desire for reconciliation, for acceptance, for an end that resurrects meaning and order in our disordered world, the bear is flung from our lives and frozen forever within the boundaries of this final page. Discarded, abandoned, dismissed by its maker, the bear is destined to roam until another imagination takes it up. 

We close the book, as if we have the power to cast out death from our kingdom. That oldest of desires. That oldest of failures.

So.

Just as all of our ordering principles are displaced or toppled, as the bear wanders the shore forever, we--like Camus's Sisyphus--amidst our own endless toil, turn and cast a Mona-Lisa-smile as we recall the mad chorus ringing throughout the Hunt:

"What a beautiful day. 
We're not scared."

And again.

"We're not scared."

Perhaps if we say it often enough, we will feel it. Perhaps we will live it. Perhaps in time, we will even believe it.

"We're not scared."

The reviewer, pondering the abyss.